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On the jobs front, it doesn't get any clearer than zero. Nor did the news get any better during the Friday-before-a-holiday-weekend news dump. One which also revealed that the public part of America's debt (as opposed to the intra-governmental debt we owe to ourselves) topped $10 trillion for the first time in history. That's an increase of 59 percent in public debt since Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20th, 2009. This is a double-barrel dose of reality that can better explained by ideology than economics. Simply put, two progressive nostrums are killing the country. To wit:

1. Government knows best. Only a fool, or a progressive would believe such utter nonsense. But they do, with a kind of religious intensity that would make the Dalai Lama blush. And it has to be religious, because only blind faith--with an accent on the blind part--could look at the gargantuan amount of waste, fraud, inefficiency, and lethargy, coupled with the legions of petty, power-mongering bureaucrats and conclude government is the answer.

Yet that so-called answer begs the obvious question: why do progressives believe government knows best? Because they believe the overwhelming majority of Americans are hopelessly stupid and need to be led around by their "betters." Note the two dominating attitudes that draw them to that conclusion. One is the unbridled contempt these people have for their fellow countrymen. As one who has long believed in the innate wisdom of most people--as opposed to the self-aggrandizing, Ivy League, book smart, elitism progressives use as their measuring stick--I find such contempt appalling.

If progressives are so brilliant, why has virtually every iota of bad economic news been characterized as "unexpected?"

The answer to that question reveals the second attitude. Arrogance. Reduced to it most basic level, progressive arrogance stems from one simple idea: I'm right, and you're not only wrong, but stupid and/or evil to boot. Now mind you, someone suffused with a tad less contempt and arrogance, might look at something like a month where zero jobs were created (or saved), or two-and-a-half years of economic malaise--most notably, the two of those years when progressives had complete and dominant control of Congress and the White House--and come to the conclusion that something's not working. Like about 14 million Americans who are unemployed and another 11 million who are working part-time, or who have given up looking for work entirely, for example. You might say to yourself, "we gave it our best Keynesian shot, it didn't work, let's try something else."

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Progressives? See government knows best, driven by contempt and arrogance. See a Thursday speech by the president and wait for the infrastructure bank, shovel-ready, command-and-control b.s., packaged with a vocabulary where any mention of the word "stimulus" is a speechwriter's firing offense. I'm betting "targeted investments" is the new catch-phrase. In other words, get ready for a new shade of lipstick on the same economic pig this president and his administration have been pushing since they assumed control. And brace yourself as well for a pig-promoting mainstream media who will tell you that any resistance to the same old same old, is Tea Party-led racism or good old-fashioned Republican obstructionism. Which brings us to our second nostrum:

2. When you're suffused with contempt and arrogance, you can actually believe that, with respect to economics, "coercion" and "incentive" are interchangeable terms. If there is a bigger progressive disconnect than this one, I would be hard-pressed to imagine what it is. Only a progressive would believe you can bash the hell out of America's wealth-creators, burden them with thousands of regulations, many of which are either unknown or more likely unknowable, and embrace crony capitalism with its government-selected "winners and losers"-- and still wonder why those wealth-creators aren't falling all over themselves to hire more workers.

Memo to the business world's would-be progressive masters: a substantial portion of America's wealth-creators are on strike. You know what a strike is all about. That's when a worker, or in this case a business owner, decides conditions are so onerous, that it no longer pays to work under them. Or in this case, hire under them. And when those wealth-creators see one of the worst examples of unbridled coercion to ever come down the pike--as in the NLRB suing Boeing airlines for daring to open a plant in a right to work state--it's not going to get any better.

Even we dullard Americans recognize a government-sponsored shakedown when we see it.

As for the president's upcoming jobs speech, Americans would be wise to note it's not a jobs speech at all. It's a campaign speech. Ergo, even if by some miracle, the dedicated socialist/Marxist/progressive who currently occupies the Oval Office did a one-eighty and embraced any sort of Reagan-esque, genuinely business-stimulating ideas that got us out of the last recession, they would be ephemeral at best. It is absolutely critical that Americans understand one over-arching reality regarding Barack Obama:

This economy is the one we've got while this man is desperately seeking re-election.

In other words, it reflects his best efforts with respect to getting elected for another four years. Four more years in which he will no longer be constrained by the necessity of winning votes. Four more years in which his habit of bypassing Congress and doing whatever he pleases will be amplified, not diminished. The common political wisdom which has preceded this president has long been the idea that no one man, no matter how bad a president he is, could ruin the nation.

This is one American who believes that theory no longer applies.

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